Want to know how to be happy – this man has the answers.
On this week’s episode of the Dot to Dot podcast, fellow psychologist Lou Jones and I talk to Russ Harris – best selling author, doctor, therapist and all round lovely guy.
Some of Russ’s words of wisdom:
“Money can’t buy you happiness – as I transitioned from a medical doctor to a therapist my income went down and down and down, a therapist earns about a third of what a doctor earns. But my fulfilment and satisfaction from the work I was doing went up and up and up.”
“I do miss the quick fix – as a doctor if someone comes in with a big boil you can just lance is and all the puss flies out and it’s fixed.”
“Virtually all medical conditions have got a psychological component to them and they’re much worse when you’re stressed.”
“We’re dealing with the human condition and the thing with the human condition is you’ve got it your whole life from the moment you’re born to the moment you die.”
“We box psychological conditions and hope that we can fix them, but life just isn’t like that – it’s messy.”
“People in medicine and high power professions like law, the armed forces, business still perceive it as a sign of weakness wifi you have stress or anxiety. People pretend they don’t suffer, that they’ve got it all under control, that’s they’re fine.”
“You compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides. Everyone around you seems on the surface to be fine and copying well, but you don’t know what they’re feeling. All those thoughts going through their head and emotions surging through their body.”
“With so many [self help] approaches they are quite exciting in the short term then people are disillusioned in the long term….we’re bombarded by messages like ‘don’t worry be happy’ and set up with unrealistic expectations.”
“We can’t stop our mind from doing those things but can change the way we respond to them, making us far more comfortable [with the negative emotions].”
“The things that matter most in life come with painful feelings. You can learn new more effective techniques to get through versus getting into a battle with them [which just makes them worse].”
Russ is hugely passionate, funny and insightful. The approach of ACT which is Russ’s lifeblood is something I first studied and thought was utterly brilliant back in 2003 when I was doing my psychology MSc. But it was so difficult to translate the theory and concepts into something useable. That’s what Harris has done – opening it up to literally thousands of people around the world. From every day folk with every day problems through to working with the World Health Organisation helping refugees in Uganda, Syria and Turkey.
